Milan Kundera - Collected Fiction, Drama, and Essays (24 books)

* Milan Kundera - Collected Fiction, Drama, and Essays (24 books)

MILAN KUNDERA (1929– 2023) was a Czech and French novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet whose works combine erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, the Herder Prize in 2000, and was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kundera's novels escape ideological classification. His style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, was greatly inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. But he repeatedly insisted on being considered a novelist, rather than a political or dissident writer. "[I]rony doesn't give a damn about messages!" he wrote in THE ART OF THE NOVEL (1986).

His first novel, THE JOKE (1967), achieved international acclaim with its comic, ironic view of the private lives and destinies of various Czechs during the years of Stalinism. LIFE IS ELSEWHERE (1969), his second novel about a hapless, romantic-minded hero who thoroughly embraces the Communist takeover of 1948, was forbidden Czech publication. Kundera had participated in the brief but heady liberalization of Czechoslovakia in 1967–68, and after the Soviet occupation of the country he refused to admit his political errors and was attacked by the authorities, who banned all his works and fired him from his teaching positions. After being allowed to emigrate with his wife to France, the Czech government stripped him of his citizenship in 1979.

Kundera's most famous work, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1984), chronicles the fragile nature of an individual's fate, theorizing that a single lifetime is insignificant in the scope of Nietzsche's concept of eternal return. It explores the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the Soviet invasion and its aftermath through the lives of two separate pairs of people and those around them.

This was followed by IMMORTALITY (1990), which explores the nature of artistic creation; IGNORANCE (2000), a story centered on the romance of two alienated Czech émigrés that draws heavily from the myth of Odysseus, specifically the "mythology of home, the delusions of roots"; and THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE (2013), about a group of Parisian friends.

Kundera's wide-ranging reflections on literature, morality, and contemporary society appear in THE ART OF THE NOVEL (1986), TESTAMENTS BETRAYED (1993), THE CURTAIN (2005), and ENCOUNTER (2009). His last work to appear in English, A KIDNAPPED WEST: THE TRAGEDY OF CENTRAL EUROPE (2023), is a short collection of early essays in which Kundera pleads the case of the "small nations" of Europe who, by culture, are Western with deep roots in Europe, despite Russia imposing its own Communist political regimes. It is also remarkably prescient with regard to Russia's current aggression in Ukraine and its threat to the rest of Europe.

Milan Kundera died after a prolonged illness, in Paris on 11 July 2023, at the age of 94.


The following books are in PDF and/or ePub format as indicated:

== FICTION ==

* Book of Laughter and Forgetting [tr. Asher] (Harper, 2023) – ePub + PDF^
* Book of Laughter and Forgetting [tr. Heim] (Penguin, 1981) – ePub
* Farewell Party [tr. Kussi] (Penguin, 1977) – PDF
* Farewell Waltz [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub
* Festival of Insignificance [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF
* Identity [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF^
* Ignorance [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF
* Immortality [tr. Kussi] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF
* The Joke [Definitive Version] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF
* The Joke [tr. Heim] (Penguin, 1983) – PDF
* Laughable Loves [tr. Rappaport] (Knopf, 1974) – PDF
* Laughable Loves [tr. Rappaport, rev'd] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF
* Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead (Faber, 2019) – ePub
* Life Is Elsewhere [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF
* Life Is Elsewhere [tr. Kussi] (Penguin, 1986) – PDF
* Slowness [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF
* Unbearable Lightness of Being [tr. Heim] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF^

== DRAMA ==

* Jacques and His Master [tr. Callow] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub
* Jacques and His Master [tr. Heim] (Harper & Row, 1985) – PDF

== ESSAYS & NON-FICTION ==

* A Kidnapped West (HarperCollins, 2023) – ePub
* Art of the Novel [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub
* The Curtain [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub
* Encounter: Essays [tr. Asher] (HarperPerennial, 2023) – ePub + PDF
* Testaments Betrayed [tr. Asher] (Faber, 2020) – ePub + PDF

PDF^ courtesy of @pharmakate


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